bascule

Linux is nice because it's a free implementation of POSIX which has garnered considerable industry support and now performs relatively well under heavy workloads.

Judging from the response on SFN, it only matters if you're a liberal

http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/06/news/economy/Fannie_Freddie_rescue_cost/index.htm?postversion=2008090619 That's not painting a very positive picture.

And all it took was the government assuming $5,000,000,000,000 in liabilities... http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/07/news/companies/fannie_freddie But hey Pangloss, if you want to toot the "EVERYTHING IS FINE" horn, be my guest

I've often seen pictures of nuclear power plants used as analogies for both how much humans are polluting and how much carbon we put into the air. I believe this is because cooling towers look like giant chimneys and the water vapor coming out of them looks like billowing smoke. I think this helps bring about a negative image of nuclear power in general. What other analogies do you see people draw which are completely incorrect?

Actually Obama's speech was on a Thursday as well...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090503351.html And the economy continues to unravel...

If she did, she didn't do a very good job. I'm gonna go with no. If I had to guess, I'd say she probably does. I don't think this is an ideological issue about parents right to control what information their children receive so much as a moral issue surrounding premarital sex. I think parents of Palin's nature see within sex education some sort of implicit "having premarital sex is ok" message and thus prefer abstinence education for that reason. But that's just my own gut feeling on the matter. A parents right to control their child's education has to be taken with a grain of salt. Unsafe sex results in both the spread of STDs and unplanned pregnancies, both of which take their toll on society. Multiple studies show that abstinence programs are not effective, and society pays the price.

I drink waaay too much

McCain's speech was certainly less invective-laced than Palin's, but contained more egregious factual inaccuracies than Obama's

Sorry to break it to you, but it's been that way for awhile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uOK9ti1kM0

Sounds like the Swiss Embassy in London: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/feb/29/art.streetart

They also signed a document which said the American government is in no way founded on the Christian religion and put separation of church and state in the first amendment to the Constitution. Also, the document you're describing was penned by a man who sought to "erect a wall of separation between church and state" (his words) and thought "the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter." When making suppositions about whether or not the Founding Fathers would've been okay with "In God We Trust" on our national currency try to keep it in context. Madison was wary of even hiring Congressional chaplains.

I think partisanship can be incredibly destructive, especially when practiced in the way the Rove brought to the Republican Party. The party leadership puts aside both facts and any will of their own to parrot Rove's talking points. Separate sets of talking points are crafted for both the news media and the blogosphere. The entire party speaks with one voice, which is an immensely powerful for convincing the general public, but also a rather insidious tool to increase party power. Look at the sheer amount of jargon they've injected into the political dialogue. We now have "country first", thanks talking points! And let's not forget flip-flopper... or elitist! The Republican Party has the news media all speaking their language, thanks in no small part to Fox News and Republican bloggers. While I'm a registered Democrat, I disagree with the party's platform and legislation in a number of regards. I will only support the party on issues I ideologically support. I don't read any literature the party distributes and am only really registered so I can vote in the primary. That said I'd be similarly opposed to Democrats parroting party talking points, and I'm sure that thing goes on to a certain degree. But the way the Republicans do it is right up in your face.

For anyone interested, here's Shepherd Fairey's reaction to his DNC experience, along with pictures of the postering: http://obeygiant.com/post/things-to-do-in-denver

Are you serious? After your "Can you site a bill" "Can you site a bill" "Can you site a speech or interview" "Can you site a speech or interview" you only bothered to look at two of his references? (by the way, the word you're looking for is "cite", not "site") Remind me to never respond to any requests from you for sources to back up my statements. You clearly just don't care. Why should anyone pay attention to you when you make multiple requests for someone to dig up information for you then don't even bother looking at it?

The errors are too numerous to summarize beyond saying she got a lot of things wrong: http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/gop_convention_spin_part_ii.html Additional coverage here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080904/ap_on_el_pr/cvn_fact_check I'm unable to find a similar fact check for Biden's speech.

How are perceptions incongruent with reason and evidence? Sounds like a false dichotomy. When it comes to politics nobody's impartial, and they're always going to see the evidence through the lens of their own personal beliefs. In many cases nobody's right or wrong because so much is left to opinion. Both sides can have well-reasoned, evidence-based beliefs which completely contradict each other.

The only practical way I can imagine making a hoverboard would be to make the surface you intend to hover over a powerful electromagnet and have the board be a permanent magnet of opposite polarity. Effectively: a single-person maglev. The board (or the floor) could contain a sensor which measures the distance between the board and the floor and varies the strength of the magnetic field accordingly. That way the board wouldn't go flying up in the air if you fell off.

It's a reality we can't pretend away, even if you pay lip service to wanting to while making partisan remarks yourself

Well, there's PhDP, the original claimant, whose opinion you shat on. That's a fair claim. You've made countless claims of that nature in the past. Pulling an O'Reillyesque "No Ideology Zone" now isn't going to change that.

Excessive nationalism is ostensibly skewed towards the Republicans, no matter how you try to gloss it over.

I see data structures as being implementations of a specific type of algorithm, and abstract data types having a specific set of properties which can be implemented in any number of ways. For example, dictionaries are simple key/value stores, but can be backed by any number of implementations, for example: binary trees, hash tables, b-trees, skip lists. Which one you choose depends on what kind of data you're storing and how you're storing it.

So if we let one street artist put up posters without getting arrested, we have to let them all do it? Last I checked street artists don't typically get arrested for putting up posters...

Ubuntu